Note FOOTNOTES — Front matter

:

[1] The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with the most beguiling mockery of distance.

[2] They made their appearance again this summer (1870).

[3] One of Mr. Lincoln’s neatest strokes of humor was his treatment of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to be presented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lincoln persisted in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refinement of good-breeding could go no further. Giving the young man his real name (already notorious in the newspapers) would have made his visit an insult. Had Henri IV. done this, it would have been famous.

[4] The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son.

[5] Apropos of his Frederick the Great.

[6] Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the “Excursions.”

[7] Publications of the Chaucer Society. London. 1869-70.

Étude sur G. Chaucer considéré comme imitateur des Trouvères. Par E. G. Sandras, Agrégé de l’Université. Paris: Auguste Dusand. 1859. 8vo. pp. 298.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury-Geschichten, uebersetzt in den Versmassen der Urschrift, und durch Einleitung und Anmerkungen erläutert. Von Wilhelm Hertzberg. Hildburghausen. 1866. 12mo. pp. 674.

Chaucer in Seinen Beziehungen zur italienischen Literatur. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde. Von Alfons Kissner. Bonn. 1867. 8vo pp. 81.

[8] Tyrwhitt doubted the authenticity of “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.” To these Mr. Bradshaw (and there can be no higher authority) would add “The Court of Love,” the “Dream,” the “Praise of Woman,” the “Romaunt of the Rose,” and several of the shorter poems. To these doubtful productions there is strong ground, both moral and æsthetic, for adding the “Parson’s Tale.”

[9] Fauriel, Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale, Vol. I. passim.

[10] Allegat ergo pro se lingua Oil quod propter sui faciliorem et delectabiliorem vulgaritatem, quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad vulgare prosaicum, suum est; videlicet biblia cum Trojanorum, Romanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pulcherrimæ et quamplures aliæ historiæ ac doctrinæ. That Dante by prosaicum did not mean prose, but a more inartificial verse, numeros lege solutos, is clear. Cf. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, pp. 92 seq. and notes. It has not, I think, been remarked that Dante borrows his faciliorem el delectabiliorem from the plus diletable et comune of his master Brunetto Latini.

[11]

[12] Compare Floripar in Fierabras with Nausikäa, for example.

[13] If internal evidence may be trusted, the Lai de l’Espine is not hers.

[14] Sir Eger and Sir Grine in the Percy Folio. The passage quoted is from Ellis.

[15] I think he tried one now and then, like “eyen columbine.”

[16] Commonly printed hath.

[17] Froissart’s description of the book of traités amoureux et de moralité, which he had had engrossed for presentation to Richard II. in 1394, is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a modern author. “Et lui plut très grandement; et plaire bien lui devoit car il é’tait enluminé, écrit et historié et couvert de vermeil velours à dis cloux d’argent dorés d’or, et roses d’or au milieu, et à deux grands fremaulx dorés et richement ouvrés au milieu de rosiers d’or.” How lovingly he lingers over it, hooking it together with et after et! But two centuries earlier, while the jongleurs were still in full song, poems were also read aloud.

t Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet.

[18] One of the very worst, be it said in passing.

[19] Whence came, pray, the Elizabethan commandëment, chapëlain, surëly, and a score of others? Whence the Scottish bonny, and so many English words of Romance derivation ending in y?

[20] Poésies de Marie de France, Tome I. p. 168.

[21] Le Roman de la Rose, Tome II. p. 890.

[22] Rutebeuf, Tome I. pp. 203 seqq. 304 seqq.

[23] From the “Craft of Lovers,” attributed by Ritson to Lydgate, but too bad even for him.

[24] Here the received texts give “So pray I to God.” Cf. “But Reason said him.” T. & C.

[25] Corrected from Kissner, p. 18.

[26] Compare this with the Mumbo-Jumbo Revenge in Collins’s Ode.

[27] London: John Russell Smith. 1856-64.

[28] Literary Remains, Vol. I. pp. 259, 260.

[29] Chapman himself was evidently pleased with this, for he cites it as a sample of his version.

[30] Early Popular Poetry. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt.

[31] The careless Ritson would have printed this twynkling.

[32] For example:—

should certainly read,

[33] The to is, we need not say, an addition of Mr. Hazlitt’s. What faith can we put in the text of a man who so often copies even his quotations inaccurately?

[34] This was Thomas Warton’s opinion.

[35] Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and twenty-ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Fletcher (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died.

[36] In his Tractate on Education.

[37] Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony were all musicians.

[38] Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray’s tune in his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one of his own finest lines,

was due to Gray’s

I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray’s “Sonnet on the Death of West,” which Wordsworth condemns as of no value, the second—

is one of Gray’s happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects greater than either of them:—

Gray’s taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, he did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only the witch Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved solitude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was the readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the pleasure of being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses a sonnet to John Dyer. But Gray was one of “the pure and powerful minds” who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the discovery of poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Walpole: “Mr. Dyer has more poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough and injudicious.” Dyer has one fine verse,—

[39] MS. letter of Voltaire, cited by Warburton in his edition of Pope, Vol. IV. p. 38, note. The date is 15th October, 1726. I do not find it in Voltaire’s Correspondence.

[40] Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in the Roman de la Rose, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy; but in Du Bartas the research of effect not seldom subjugates the thought as well as the phrase.

[41] Barclaii Satyricon, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France.

[42] Usually printed arms, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to correspond with dint, which he used in its old meaning of a downright blow.

[43] Morgante, xviii. 115.

[44] Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by the vices of Donne’s manner, he had good company in Herbert and Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem he says,—

[45] Preface to the Theatrum.

[46] Bowles’s Sonnets, wellnigh forgotten now, did more than his controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence upon the coming generation was great (greater than we can well account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us that he made forty copies of them while at Christ’s Hospital. Wordsworth’s prefaces first made imagination the true test of poetry, in its more modern sense. But they drew little notice till later.

[47] Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759, II. Brief. See also his more elaborate criticism of the “Essay on Man” (Pope ein Metaphysiker), 1755.